Men’s water polo breaks record against UC Davis with 52nd straight win

It’s been 687 days since the No. 1 UCLA men’s water polo team last lost.

Two national championships and nearly two years later, the Bruins – all of them – claimed outright ownership of the NCAA consecutive wins record with their 52nd straight victory Sunday afternoon.

“The thing that I was happy about was that everybody got to play today, everybody got to be a part of this,” said coach Adam Wright. “Our team, from the first guy to the very last guy, works so hard for this, and it was really good to be able to get everybody out there.”

The team has said multiple times that it’s never felt tied to the win streak – what’s pressured them has been just being UCLA and playing to the high standards they set for themselves, according to Wright and undergraduate assistant coach Danny McClintick.

“Towards the end of the game when we knew that we pretty much sealed the deal, it was funny,” said senior attacker Ryder Roberts. “We messed up and we got scored on and all the guys on the bench were only concerned about trying to fix that moment right then.”

It would be the one goal UC Davis scored in the fourth quarter. The Bruins put in their five man defense after the Aggies drew an exclusion, and they converted.

“We could have easily came out of the pool and been like, ‘Well, we got scored on but we still have the win streak so who cares,’” Roberts said. “Even during the game when we knew that we had the win streak, we were just worried about getting better, which is really refreshing.”

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It was refreshing because the goal has always been on preparing for how they want to play at the end of the season, Roberts said, and the discussion after that play in the fourth reinforced for him the team’s focus on its ultimate goal.

Only 23 hours after the team got out of the pool against a top-five team in No. 4 Pacific, UCLA was down 0-2 in the first quarter before goals from redshirt junior attacker Max Irving, junior utility Alex Roelse and junior center Matt Farmer changed the pace of the game.

“We got off to a pretty slow start actually,” McClintick said. “They were prepared and they played well … and it’s tough to play a team like (Pacific) and then turn around and come back. Davis is an excellent team, they are very well-coached.”

[Related: Men’s water polo ties national record with win over Pacific]

The eight total goals the Aggies put up against UCLA is more any other team not in the top-10 since No. 13 Princeton scored nine in the second tournament of the season, nearly a month ago.

But by halftime, redshirt senior goalie Garrett Danner had nine saves and UCLA was up 8-4.

From then on, UCLA outscored UC Davis 7-4 to finish the game. Nine different players in total racked up goals, two each from Roberts, Irving, Farmer and senior defender Chancellor Ramirez while Roelse led the team with three.

The 687-day-long streak will at the very least continue until UCLA’s next game against No. 7 Santa Barbara on Thursday.

At the end of the day, however, the consensus was that day number 688, and all the days after, will continue to be business as usual – just like how it’s always been.

“The win streak is a byproduct of people in the program doing things the right way,” McClintick said. “It wasn’t the goal and wasn’t something that a lot of us thought about until it started getting really close and was in the paper, but that’s the most important takeaway – when you do things right and do things the way they’re supposed to be done, a lot of good things can happen.”